Add storm prep to the list of operations that big data analytics can help oil and gas companies improve upon. The need for optimization in this area has been underscored by the turbulent hurricane season of 2017, which has resulted in at least 15 named storms, and counting.

The E&P industry’s oilfield service companies seem to be meeting the sector’s digital transformation head-on. The E&P industry’s oilfield service companies seem to be meeting the sector’s digital transformation head-on. Last week, three large service companies—Baker Hughes, Schlumberger and Weatherford—announced new offerings in the Big Data space. Not long before that, on Aug. 22, Halliburton revealed new digital tools at its LIFE 2017 conference in Houston. The technologies launched by these major companies each use data to automate similar, but different, aspects of upstream oil and gas operations.

The “digital twin” is one of many common colloquialisms used by data wizards during technical presentations on the virtues of the E&P industry’s digital transformation. Such terms also include “the internet of things” (IoT) and “machine learning,” among others. Confusingly, these terms can often be used gratuitously and interchangeably, without much explanation. While this ambiguous usage can render understanding of these terms difficult, the functions that the phrases refer to have the potential to make upstream operations in the oil patch much more efficient.

Exploration scientists scouring Earth’s geology for carbon-bearing minerals are endeavoring to remove the guesswork from the process, and they are doing so by deploying strategies from the playbooks of tech giants like Netflix and Amazon, according to a recent report by Reuters.

Danish rig contractor Maersk Drilling has nailed its digital stake deeply into the E&P industry’s big data landscape. With the company’s latest announcement that it will expand its data analytics partnership with GE Marine, the driller seems to be leading the pack of its drilling contractor peers in the upstream industry’s digital transformation.

Cyber-attacks are developing into formidable threats within the oil and gas industry, and according to a recent study by Deloitte, the industry may not be regarding these threats with the respect that they deserve.

Companies from around the world are starting to establish new executive-level positions, as in “chief digital officers (CDOs),” to navigate the open sea of the digital transformation, according to a recent survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers. There is one notable laggard, however—the oil and gas industry, as indicated by PwC’s findings.

As new players continue to pour into the oilfield services sector, each fighting for a piece of the Big Data pie, one large player that can’t be missed amid the landscape of digital competitors is General Electric.

As the oil and gas industry continues to invent new ways to unlock resources mechanically—in increasingly harder-to-reach reservoirs—so too is it formulating new data-driven imaging techniques, allowing companies to visualize reserves that were previously hidden.

The upstream oil and gas industry should take notice of the WannaCry ransomware attack that hit companies across the globe last week, holding valuable proprietary data hostage unless the organizations agreed to pay off the hackers in Bitcoin, for safe return of the information.

The oil field’s digital transformation is bringing sweeping change to the upstream industry, from using data analysis to help companies find the oil, to the possibility of operating equipment autonomously. These technological inventions will bring significant structural changes—similar to how those wrought by the advent of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing changed the industry, reducing the cost of production in North America drastically.

It’s no secret to the offshore drilling community that expandable underreamers are tremendously important tools in deepwater drilling, but underreamer failure is also a major contributor to increased costs and nonproductive time during drilling operations.